"Five sailors were rescued but two are still missing," Kenya Seafearers Assistance Programme (KSAP) official Andrew Mwangura told AFP by phone.

The sailors were aboard the Portuguese-registered Global Island cargo ship, which left the Kenyan port of Mombasa on December 25 heading to Dubai for repair, he added.

"After their ship wrecked off the Somali coast over the weekend, the sailors sent an SOS and by the time a US navy ship arrived, it only managed to rescue five," Mwangura said.

US embassy spokesman Richard May told AFP that the rescue operation by the USS Hue City patrolling the Indian Ocean started on Sunday night.

The precise time and circumstances of the wreck were unclear, but Somali's coast was battered by tidal waves caused by a massive December 26 earthquake off Indonesia, resulting in the death of more than 140,000 people in the world.

"Five sailors were from Kenya, one from Tanzania and the captain from either New Zealand or Australia," Mwangura explained, speaking from the port city of Mombasa.

However, May said the captain was a German national and so far four Kenyans and a Tanzania had been rescued.

US ships are stationed in Djibouti, at the southern end of the Red Sea and across from the Arabian peninsula in one of the world's most unstable regions, as part of a US-led campaign against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and other terrorist suspects.

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